It was a controversial decision, but our judges decided that Centro Properties’ finance team was due for recognition for an extremely difficult period of regrouping.

At an extraordinary general meeting on November 30, 2011, a vote will be put to more than 10,000 shareholders from both Centro Properties Group and the Centro Retail Group to create a new $3.4 billion property trust.

If the shareholders vote “yes” they’ll get $0.053 a share. Shortly before they crashed in 2007 those shares were ­valued at almost $10. Chief financial officer Chris Nunn says that, as unattractive as 5¢ a share sounds, the proposal is an opportunity for shareholders to “get something rather than nothing”.

When master of ceremonies Adam Spencer announced that the Centro Properties Group had been highly commended at the 2011 CFO Dealbook Awards luncheon, a ­murmur swept through the room.

The negative reaction from the crowd was not entirely unexpected. Centro’s fall from grace, when it found itself unable to ­refinance billions of dollars worth of short-term debt in 2007, was high profile and its restructure and the class actions from ­investors it is currently facing have been well documented in the media ever since.

But the judges, who were asked to ­consider an application dealing with the ­performance of the finance team over the previous calendar year only, summed up their controversial choice saying it was “in recognition of a marathon achievement from a small, tight team that [has] kept things together under extremely difficult operating conditions, executed complex transactions and worked towards restructuring the business”.

The Centro finance team today is very ­different from the team of 2007. Since 2008 the team has grown by about 30 per cent and about 80 per cent of the team is new. The ­current CFO, Nunn, arrived in September 2009. He says “the quality and quantity of information that the finance team now provides to management and the board is vastly superior”. Nunn also believes that the types of questions asked by boards today generally “are far more sophisticated”.

Paul Belcher, general manager finance, joined the company in 2006 and has been a part of the finance team through “thick and thin”. Belcher concedes that pre-2007 the company was growing ­rapidly and the back office probably wasn’t growing at the same speed. However, he argues that the collapse of Centro was not the result of “an erroneous finance team” but rather of the company “making significant, largely debt-funded acquisitions, shortly before the onset of the global financial crisis”.

Belcher says at the time those decisions were made the finance team members were solely information providers with no responsibility for strategic decisions. He says this is no longer the case.

Belcher highlights two crucial lessons. First, the importance of maintaining open lines of communication with the banks. “Your bankers need to know as much as possible about your business, not just what they ask, so that if things go bad it is not such a surprise,” he says.

Second, cash flow is king. This is especially true in property because property values can go down quickly and take the equity in the business with them. “A profit and loss statement reporting a profit is not enough if the business is not generating any cash.”